


Walking Toward Forever

by The Stephanois (orphan_account)



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Friendship, M/M, Post-Post-Snap, Recovery, Weddings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-18
Updated: 2018-10-20
Packaged: 2019-07-13 20:46:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16025681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/The%20Stephanois
Summary: “Do you think this is a mistake?”“You marrying Pepper? No.” Bruce pauses. “Holding an open-bar reception for super-powered people who haven't been able to talk about their trauma because no one else in the universe knows about That One Thing – ”“Okay, you've made your point – ”“Also no.” He catches Tony's dead-eyed stare. “What? I think it'll be a good time. At least the band's back together.”





	1. Bruce's Drug-Assisted Psychotic Break

**Author's Note:**

> What lies ahead is silliness and perhaps a surprising degree of melancholy, because that's apparently just how my brain works.

From this high up, he could see down into the guts of One Vanderbilt, where two tiny construction workers appeared to be having a screaming argument on the horizontal bracing.

The building had to be at almost twenty stories now. A month ago, it was forty-five; Bruce remembered reading a blurb about setbacks the project faced after the Snap took the brain trust of the principal engineering firm. It was strange to think of all that hard-won progress as now reversed. The final tower would never have this footnote in its history; its tour guides would bring visitors past the sixteenth floor without pausing to explain about the changeover.

One of the workers made a gesture to the other, the message unmistakable even from so far away. The second worker turned and stalked off.

“Dr. Banner?” Bruce looked away from the window and met the assistant's polite smile with one of his own. “Ms. Potts is ready for you.”

Pepper and her immaculate office made him feel a little underdressed, even though he ironed his shirt before leaving this morning. But then he figured: she was marrying a man who walked around in the world's most expensive tracksuit every day. She probably didn't give the state of his shirt a passing thought.

They exchanged a brief hug and sat down on a pair of lowslung chairs that didn't know whether they wanted to be armchairs or therapy chaises. Bruce sat on the edge of the cushion. Pepper offered him coffee; he politely abstained.

“You're about to head out for your bachelorette weekend getaway, right?” he asked as she poured herself a cup.

She nodded, smiling. “My very top secret bachelorette weekend getaway. Was it Tony or Natasha who told you?”

He said with faint surprise, “I – Natasha's going? On the trip?”

“We _are_ friends, Bruce. Also this way I can be sure Tony won't have a surveillance detail on us the whole time.”

The surprise was no longer so faint. “And he agreed to that?”

“He pretended to.” She smiled, but it wasn't as good-humored as it might have been a few years ago. “Natasha assures me she can disable any failsafes he set up.” She cleared her throat lightly and set her cup down on the table. “That's actually kind of why I asked you to meet me this morning.”

“I don't know how to disable Tony's failsafes.” It wasn't a lie so long as he didn't actually look at the system and try.

“Is that your way of avoiding a can't-won't conversation?”

“I do hate those,” he admitted. “Never have one about going to a restaurant or to see a movie, it's always about something that could end up destroying a city.”

“Well, don't worry, I wasn't going to ask about that anyway. Like I said: Natasha, coming on the trip. It's taken care of.”

He then made the fatal mistake of relaxing a little. “So what did you want to talk about?”

Pepper clasped her hands in her lap and leaned forward to fix him with a serious, unblinking blue stare. “I want to know what Thanos is, and if I should be worried that Tony keeps having nightmares about it.”

It was just as well that he hadn't accepted that cup of coffee, because he probably would have fumbled it. “Tony's having nightmares?”

It was an idiotic response, and Pepper didn't do him the courtesy of pretending otherwise. His eyes dodged her disbelieving look.

“Look, have you asked Rhodey about this?”

“I've known James Rhodes for over fifteen years,” she said, tone very even. “If you think I don't know which subjects I can expect help from him on regarding Tony and which will get me a stonewall of Yes Ma'am Air Force bullshit – ”

Pepper didn't swear often, so it was extra persuasive when she did. “Got it. No, you're right, I'm sorry.”

“I did ask Natasha,” she said after a short pause. “She told me she and Tony 'don't do therapy shop talk'.”

That was definitely very true. Bruce didn't think Natasha had been in a psychologist's office that wasn't attached to an underground bunker with top secret security clearance. And Tony, well, he probably just didn't go to therapy. It was one of the larger and more ragged holes in his rich person persona.

“Bruce, please,” Pepper said. She reached over and put her hand on his, and didn't take it away even when he tensed a little too obviously. “I swear I'm not trying to put you in an awkward position here, but what am I supposed to do? I'm getting married in a week's time and the man who's going to be my husband is acting like he just fell through another wormhole.”

Bruce had to shut his eyes for a moment, because _this_ was the problem – not just for Tony, but for all of them. There hadn't been another wormhole. Everything was just fine and, for the rest of the world, had been for a while.

“I can't explain to you what Tony's going through, only he can do that,” he said. Pepper's fingers tightened a little, and he turned his hand over so he could interlace them with his own. He ignored his usual instincts and looked her square in the eye. “But Pepper – I swear to you, it's over. It's all over. Tony's good.”

“All right,” she said slowly. She searched his face for a moment, wary. “And what about you, Bruce? Tony said you've been spending a lot of time upstate recently.”

His mouth twisted into a smile and he nodded. “You know, I'm good too. Really.”

He was ninety floors above a New York City that was once again teeming with life. It had to be true.

* * *

There'd been a strange fragility to the city during the Snap. It was hard to pin down. The subway was never crowded – still underfunded, of course, but when trains were delayed, people would just get out and walk, like miles and schedules meant nothing.

Bruce had to stop walking through midtown because the lack of people made him almost dizzy. At night he'd dream of skyscrapers swaying in the wind, that famous skyline unmoored for lack of people to serve as ballast. Steve said he'd walked through bombed-out villages in Europe that felt less grim than his old neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Now that was all undone, and no one but them would ever know what the city had been like during that time.

It hadn't been easy, keeping the truth from the rest of the world, but for once it was a unanimous decision. Bruce thinks a few of them half-expected Steve to argue for honesty, but when the vote came he put his hand up for lying and never said a word sideways about why.

Bruce went back and forth on the question. He'd never been a spiritual person, but he wondered if people would have preferred to face the challenge of knowing what was out there – what could happen, had happened. It would be a test of faith on a level never encountered by a human being.

He doesn't like to think about the decision in terms of power wielded, but that's what it was: power, in humanity's oldest form. The Snap had beget at least a dozen offshoot religions, not to mention all the people who stubbornly clung to the idea that the Rapture had swept through and left them. Millions of people praying, clutching hands and Bibles, sobbing through vows to their silent god or kneeling in worship to a filthy purple icon – and the Avengers erased all of it with a simple voice vote around a table in upstate New York.

Sometimes Bruce wanted to laugh until he was sick.

* * *

He took an Adirondack train out of the city. This involved a lot of grimacing and turning from dozens of tell-tale raised phones aimed his way, because he's been back on earth for a long while but to any person on the street, he just resurfaced after missing for two years.

He walked through the train until he found a mostly empty cart – easy to find, because it was the middle of a weekday and everyone else in the state had things to occupy their time. He settled in a seat and watched the passing scenery.

He made it all the way to Yonkers before he gave in and Skyped Thor.

Norway was six hours ahead of New York, which put Asgard comfortably at pre-dinner, assuming Thor was pressing ahead with his plan of morale-boosting communal feasts.

“Korg's been agitating,” Thor told him after they'd exchanged greetings. His display was still dark and he sounded very muffled, which could mean he was either in an area with poor reception or that he was attempting to talk on the phone while literally building a wall again.

Bruce frowned. “Did you say agitating?”

“Yes. He thinks Asgard should become a parliamentary republic.”

“Oh.” Bruce had no idea how he was supposed to respond to the dismantling of Thor's ancestral seat of power. “I'm – sorry?”

There was a sharp burst of speaker static and Thor's face finally appeared on the screen. He was standing outside somewhere, judging by the vivid blue background and the way his hair was rendered a golden halo.

Oh good lord, Bruce thought, completely appalled. He forced himself to notice how he could see up his nose from this angle.

“What for?” said Thor. “No, it's fantastic. Brunnhilde is sure that she and I can still act as protectors of the realm and be really, really popular with everyone.”

“Sounds like a win all around,” he said, grinning a little down at the phone. “Any progress with the Norwegians? There was an article about the proceedings in the Times today, but I haven't got a chance to read it yet.”

“Erik Selvig says it most likely won't end in war.” It was impossible to tell if he sounded disappointed about this news.

“That's good. Great.”

“I suppose,” said Thor. “The lawyers he found are very insistent that I stay out of it as much as possible.”

“Sovereign nations don't like strange men showing up and laying claim to land, yeah. You should listen to them. Consider it practice for when the Asgardian Parliament gets up and running.”

The conversation fell into a small trough then. Bruce tried not to gaze too directly at the other man's face (difficult when it's the only thing on his screen) or ask if he was going to come back (difficult when it's the only question on his mind). The effort expended to accomplish both of these tasks left few resources for making small talk.

After a few seconds, he noticed a strange expression on Thor's face. “What is it?”

“Nothing, nothing.” And then, after a pause: “I can see up your nose from this angle.”

Bruce suppressed a sigh.

* * *

Back at the Avengers headquarters, Bruce was confronted with the same situation he'd left behind in the poor light of dawn twelve hours previous – that is, a building completely devoid of company and activity. All the others were off tending to their recently reacquired social and professional lives, which neatly left Bruce to twiddle his thumbs and remember that he had no one and nothing outside this semi-autonomous vigilante gig. Rough stuff.

Wanda and Vision weren't around at the moment either, which Bruce couldn't help but feel profoundly thankful for. They both seemed like perfectly nice people, but neither knew about the Snap. And the three of them were pretty awkward around each other. Wanda only knew him as the Avenger who destroyed part of Johannesburg and then fucked off to space, a sequence of events for which they're both uncomfortably culpable. And as for Vision – Bruce couldn't shake the feeling he was basically his absentee dad.

Without the context of Thanos to explain his return, it kind of looked like he just showed up one day, completely assured of his own welcome. He'd worry about looking like a jerk, but it was hard to summon the energy for that kind of thing nowadays.

His private rooms felt more empty than they had any right to without Thor there. Neither of them were big on possessions, so there was no reason for the comfortable but spare rooms to feel any different in this timeline.

He went to his lab and spun on his stool for all of five minutes before getting up and walking out again. Still burned out? Check.

He wandered down to the nearest exercise room with a vague ambition that entirely evaporated during the first mile on the treadmill. He spent longer staring critically at his chest in the locker room mirror than he had lifting dumbbells.

“Friday, do you keep logs of training room use?” he asked the air.

“It is a component of my biometric analysis programming, yes.”

“Could you please,” is he this pathetic, really? “Maybe delete the past forty minutes?” He is, he really is.

Friday paused almost imperceptibly before returning, “I'm sorry, Dr. Banner. Sir seems to have left a subroutine – ”

“Right.”

“ – as well as a note for you – ”

“Really, Friday, that's all right – ”

“'Nice try, Bruce', says Sir.”

Bruce's mouth twisted and he nodded to himself.

“Is there anything else I can do you for you, Dr. Banner?” He really hoped he was just imagining the slightly pitying tone in the AI's voice. Projection or, or something. Tony was a genius but surely he hadn't managed quite this level of emotional nuance in the programming.

“No, I'm good. Thanks anyway, Friday.”

* * *

It's actually a surprise that he never resorted to drugs sooner. The tabloids, at least, had speculated about it. So, too, had the anonymous fan from Grand Junction who sent him a care package with half an ounce of hydroponically grown cannabis after news of his reappearance broke.

“Well, you have to admit, their method of getting it through the mail was clever,” he'd said at the time.

“I did you the courtesy of testing it for contaminants.” Tony slapped him on the back. “You're all clear.”

Bruce looked at him like he was insane. “You can't seriously think I'm going to use any of it.”

Tony shrugged; later on, Bruce noticed that he'd left the package out on an open shelf in their shared lab, the label with the big green leaf conspicuously turned to face the room and anyone who might stop by to talk.

“Is it that bad an idea?” asked Steve on one of his quick pit stops between visits to Sam and Bucky. The man didn't talk much about what he was doing, so it was impossible for Bruce to tell if he realized he was operating some kind of transatlantic booty-call ring of Army vets. He was clearly a little happier, which was a nice change.

“Is what a bad idea?”

“The marijuana. What? I knew a guy in my building, kept a couple plants out on the fire escape. Always said it helped with his colitis.”

“People back then also thought cigarettes helped asthma,” Bruce pointed out, but he knew it was a cheap shot even as he said it. Then he saw the look on Steve's face. Realizing all at once that Captain America might be one of Those People about the issue of legalization, he hurried to forestall a lecture, “Look, it's just not my thing, all right?”

Feeling a little like a hypocrite, he now grabbed the package and beat a retreat to his private rooms.

As soon as he opened the container on his coffee table, the unmistakable fragrance unfurled into the air. For a very strange moment, sense memory made him feel nervous about the smell. Then he remembered that one, he was in the middle of a heavily fortified semi-sovereign estate and two, he was pretty sure New York decriminalized a few years ago anyway. _Then_ he wondered if the property would technically fall under federal rather than state jurisdiction and had to abandon the line of thought before he lost his nerve.

After several seconds of rummaging through his junk drawer (which was much cleaner now than a month ago, and it was stupid to feel wistful over missing rubberbands and spare bolts, just _stupid_ ), he had to give up and go back to the lab for a lighter. But the lab didn't have a lighter, of course, just the spark lighter that went with the bunson burners, so he had to go search the main kitchen area. Eventually he found a pack of matches.

He felt a little like a ghost, drifting through the deserted halls of the residence. He asked Friday to play some music, but Tony's ACDC playlist just made things weird, like he was a teenager alone at home.

Back in his living room, he rolled a surprisingly decent joint from the papers in the care package and took it over to his bay window. He kneeled on the cushion, angled his body towards the open window, and, awkwardly cupping one hand around the end, lit the joint.

He committed several minutes to the window. And it was – huh.

 _Huh_.

* * *

A couple hours later, Tony walked into Bruce's rooms without knocking. Maybe he figured there wasn't any need anymore, since only Bruce was living there. Or maybe he was just Tony and he'd not-so-secretly always wanted to live in a big household where one could do away with inconvenient things like other people's privacy. He would've been a complete nightmare to have as a sibling.

Bruce waved at him vaguely over the back of his sofa. He pointedly did not get up or otherwise move, and after a few seconds he let his arm collapse.

“Friday, is this Donovan? Why is Donovan playing?” asked Tony. He stopped in the middle of the room and took a very deliberate sniff of the air. He narrowed his eyes at Bruce. “ _Really_.”

“Don't give me that look. You left it out, you basically pushed me into it.” When Tony continued to look unimpressed, Bruce switched tack. He lifted the stub of his second joint. “Did you know this strain of cannabis was named after me? Bruce Banner. I can now smoke myself.”

“And eat yourself,” Tony said, wandering over to the open package on the table. He picked up a packet of gummies and examined the label with interest.

“I,” he said with dignity, “was not going to make that joke.”

“Of course not, you couldn't pull it off. That's why I'm here.”

Bruce nodded at the gummies. “You ever?” And when Tony shook his head, he said, “Really, never? Not even at MIT?”

“You should know Rhodey exaggerates almost everything in his MIT stories,” Tony informed him, tossing the packet back down. “And no, really, _never ever_. Heard it makes people paranoid, didn't sound appealing for – obvious reasons.”

Bruce felt a stirring of indignation. “You told me I was all clear.”

“You were. Nothing in that package but the real stuff. Oh, come on, Bruce. Paranoia's never been your issue.”

He wondered what Tony thought his issue was.

Tony went on, “Anyway, in school I stuck mostly to drinking with the occasional excursion into Molly and LSD. You know, practically straight edge.”

Bruce hummed thoughtfully. “Ever try micro-dosing? Had a colleague at Culver who swore by it.” Tony shook his head, and he added, unthinking: “Maybe we should've when we were trying to fix the Snap.”

At the very least, it would've made the increasingly grim games of hangman on the whiteboard more interesting. (Steve, it turned out, was freakishly good for a guy who'd been on ice for 70 years. Had they not been staring down the deaths of billions – and therefore, you know, pretty depressed – Bruce was sure Tony would've been pulling some strings and setting him up for a celebrity Wheel of Fortune appearance).

Tony went a little pale at the mention of the Snap, but he didn't let any of it into his voice when he said, “Bruce, is this you spiraling? Have you chosen the eve of my wedding to succumb to a drug-assisted psychotic break?”

 _Who needs drugs for that?_ he wondered. Aloud, he said, “Is the entire week the _eve_ of your wedding? They make reality TV shows about people like you, you know.” Groomzilla. He mouths the word to himself, testing it out. He didn't think he could pull it off. Maybe Rhodey; he should remember to text him about it.

Tony folded his arms and watched him for a moment. Bruce waited, easy.

“...how does the Big Guy react to that stuff, anyway?” came the unstoppable creep of scientific curiosity.

Bruce responded to the sound of it like a drunk who's just met another drunk sitting on the Bourbon Street sidewalk half an hour before bar close – with the sincere gladness of one meeting a comrade of the soul. He had so little to do these days.

“Want to find out? We haven't tested the improved Hulk chamber on Lower Level Three.”

Tony looked sorely tempted. Bruce would try to give him puppy eyes, but he's been told by numerous authority figures and women in his life that they just made him look nervous. So he waited again: less easy, more hopeful.

“All right,” said Tony. "Fine. Let's do this."

“ _Yes._ ”

Bruce rolled off the couch. On his way down, he accidentally kneed the coffee table – with a sharp snap, the wood cracked halfway across the surface. He and Tony both looked at it for a long moment, saying nothing.


	2. Bruce's Sad Sack Sulk

“My life was always my job, you know?” said Rhodey. “Comes with the territory. But after the Avengers, it _really_ became my job. Then, you know, Snap – all our lives became our jobs, or maybe our jobs became our lives, and it turns out misery actually doesn't love company, because those were some _shitty_ times, am I right? Now that we're back to normal Avenging hours, I've really come to appreciate the value of down time.”

They were at the Farmers Market.

“Down time's great,” Bruce lied. “But what's the connection between that and driving forty-five minutes at the crack of dawn to ogle vegetables we could have delivered.”

He immediately felt guilty for saying it. The agricultural sector and farmers markets were hit hard by the Snap, and he should be more appreciative now that they were back. Who didn't like salads? Or discovering forgotten bags of greens two weeks too late at the bottom of the fridge?

He dutifully scanned a nearby table laden with lettuce, snap peas, and spring onions but accidentally caught the eye of the person behind the table. He carefully didn't panic and gave her an awkward closed-mouth smile before turning away at a perfectly normal speed.

(It was absurd to feel awkward, but he did. He has helped save the planet several times over, but he still felt anxiety passing by stalls without buying anything. Yet another way in which life was unfair, he guessed.)

“Bruce, I'm talking about quality of life here. You don't get that through a delivery drone.”

“But I like my delivery drone,” he said. “It gets my physics jokes.” He had five and no one aside from the drone had ever heard them or ever will. He'd be suspicious over how Tony knew to tailor the drone's programming like that, but it actually fell under the narrow (but deep) purview of ways in which the man could be thoughtful.

Rhodey was silent a moment, but he was Best Man for a reason. He admitted, “They are pretty great. Mine high fives me with its little claw hands.”

“I love the little claw hands.”

“And it can dance.”

“You dance with it?” asked Bruce.

“Hell yeah I do.” They stopped in front of a strawberry stall and he turned to him, tapping his leg frame meaningfully. “I have a program that creates a link between the drone and my legs. I've taught it how to do the perfect Charleston.”

Afterward, while driving back to the compound, Rhodey checked his rear and side mirrors and asked casually, “So how are you doing, man?”

“I'm doing great,” he said automatically.

“Really?”

“Yeah, _really_. What's with the tone?”

“There's no tone.”

“I can hear the tone,” Bruce said, accusing. “You think I'm cracking up. I'm not cracking up.”

Rhodey let his silence do the talking and restrained himself to merely looking pointedly away from the road and at Bruce with raised eyebrows.

“I'm not,” he insisted.

This was exactly the kind of awful thing that happened when people wound up actually caring about each other.

During the Snap, by the time Tony had found his way back to Earth with his newfound frenemy Nebula in tow, Bruce and Rhodey had bonded hard through the grief and stress. It was a friendship built like a laboratory diamond – crafted from high pressure and heat, forged faster than natural and coming out weirdly shaped but hard enough to cut through any material in the world, but most especially bullshit.

When Rhodey needed to get quietly hammered after Tony and Pepper's Save the Date announcement, it had been Bruce who sat with him. He supposed now that he was the one doing – whatever it was that he was doing, Rhodey felt like he needed to say something in turn.

“When I picked you up this morning, your living room was in pieces. _Literally._ Did you take a wall out?”

“It wasn't load-bearing,” Bruce muttered.

“Was it the Hulk? Is he trying to take over again?”

It was a reasonable assumption, and Bruce had been worried about that for the first few weeks after they restored everything. But: “Scarlet – _Wanda_. She said she should be able to help if anything like that occurs.” He wasn't crazy about the offer and suspected Steve or Nat nudged her into it, but as last resorts go it wasn't a bad one.

Rhodey didn't seem to like that. “She doesn't know why the other guy was hiding out in the first place. Would we have to tell her?” Being career military, he held _need-to-know_ as a guiding philosophy in life. He'd been one of the first to suggest keeping the Snap a secret.

Bruce shook his head. “I just told her my balance had been off since Asgard.”

Rhodey nodded and eased up on the gas pedal. They were nearing the first of the security checkpoints that stood between the general public and the Avengers perimeter. When not arriving in a Quinjet or battlesuit, the entry process was long and tedious, even for them.

“Speaking of Asgard,” said Rhodey, eyes fixed serenely on the street gate ahead. “You talk to Thor recently?”

 _Laboratory diamond friendship_. Bruce gave him a dirty look.

* * *

The worst parts of the Snap were when he was all right.

It was monstrous to even think of it like that. Those weren't _good_ times. They were all in a chaotic limbo, trying to fight the end times after the end times had already come and gone and meanwhile still having to attend to all of life's mundane requirements (eating, shitting, and sleeping didn't stop being necessary just because one survived a cosmic genocide).

It went deeper than personal grief, though there was plenty of that too. The world had ended and there was no refuge from it because they knew – _the Avengers_ knew, even while they took care not to explain this part to the rest of the clamoring, panicked world – that this same confusion and suffering was being felt everywhere across the universe.

But the biggest surprise for Bruce was how well he, out of maybe everyone, kept it together.

The Hulk was still hiding and he'd just gone through a different world-ending cataclysm on Asgard. But his life had been a complete mess for so long, it was like he reached a limit on his ability to flinch. The whole universe was reeling but Bruce? He got up in the mornings and went to work.

Thor didn't exactly have a similar experience.

He'd wanted to go after Thanos immediately. But with no hint of where he'd gone or how they could find him, he had no choice but to stay on earth. He raged for five hours, killing every last Outrider still standing outside Birnin Zana.

Then he collapsed on the field and fell into a coma that lasted three months.

* * *

“Look, if it's. If you're missing the Snap, that's – well, all kinds of wrong, obviously, but – ”

“I'm not,” he said immediately. He was being honest. “Rhodey, it's not that. Really.”

He was not sure how it was possible to make a noise that passed itself off as noncommittal while actually being extremely unimpressed, but Rhodey managed. “Then explain the current sad sack sulk you got going.”

It was one thing to know you were being pathetic, but another for a friend to call you on it. Bruce watched the approaching fence line of the next checkpoint with disgruntlement.

“My closet's empty,” is what he came up with.

Eyebrows crashing down, Rhodey turned his head and checked his expression. “Is that a metaphor?”

“No, I mean – before,” during the Snap, “it was full of Thor's coats. And he had a lot of coats.” Truly baffling in number, and Bruce still didn't know where or when he acquired them. And now he probably never would, because – “Now the coats aren't there, because they don't exist – ”

“I mean,” said Rhodey. “They probably exist. Somewhere.”

Bruce shook his head. “But they're not in my closet. Because they never _were_.”

“So this _is_ a metaphor.”

He sagged forward against the wishes of his seatbelt and covered his face with his hands. “Yeah, maybe.”

“Why's he hiding his face?” demanded Tom, the Checkpoint Two security guy. He was one of Happy Hogan's hires. “We need positive identification every time, remember.”

“You know, people never talked to me like this in the Air Force,” Rhodey told Bruce as he reluctantly raised his head and allowed Tom to check it against his ID. “Sometimes I hate the private sector.”

They pulled away from Checkpoint Two and Bruce said, “Are we private sector? And anyway, don't mind Tom. He just found out his girlfriend's been cheating on him with their vet. He's losing the relationship and his cat.”

“How do you even know that?” Rhodey asked incredulously.

“It's my face,” he tried to explain, a little morose about it. “People always assume I'm a good listener for some reason. Usually nowadays they're too intimidated, but if I haven't Hulked out for a while, it's – it's like they forget or something.”

They lapsed into a silence that lasted through Checkpoint Four.

“You know, _I_ 'm a great listener,” Rhodey said eventually.

“I've said all that I'm going to say.”

“All right, all right.”

They eventually pulled into the drive on the residential side of the compound. Bruce unbuckled his seatbelt, but Rhodey didn't shut off the engine. Then they both noticed the magenta Vespa parked in front of the door.

“So Wanda's back,” said Rhodey.

“Looks like,” said Bruce, a little heavily.

He noticed the tone. “Things still awkward with her?”

“I said I'd choke the life out of her and not even turn green. What do you think?”

“You gotta get over that, man. After Berlin – ”

Bruce groaned. He was sick of hearing about the grand slam rumble at the Berlin airport.

“I'm just saying, she probably doesn't even remember that,” Rhodey finished.

“Right.” Bruce's hand went to the door. He glanced over but was careful not to let any hope leech into his voice. “You staying for a while?”

“Nope,” he said cheerfully. “Gotta check on the final preparations.” Rhodey, as Best Man and also the only groomsman in possession of military grade logistical thinking, was in charge of planning Tony's bachelor party. He refused to tell Bruce anything about it.

“All right. Well. Guess I'll see you then.”

He got out of the vehicle and tried not to feel too much like he was dying with every step closer to the door of the residence.

* * *

He went by the kitchen first, to shove his blueberries and artichokes into the crisper drawer of the fridge. When he closed the door, Wanda was standing on the other side of it.

He didn't jump and she didn't flinch. They were perfectly normal housemates.

“You're back,” he said, unnecessarily.

She was dressed for exercise and wearing earbuds. He didn't know if she'd heard him. After a second, her eyes darted obviously between him and the fridge, and he clued in enough to get out of the way of the door. Once he did this, she retrieved a sports drink.

Then she said, “Yes.”

He put his hands on the counter behind him. “Is uh, Vision back as well?”

“Would you be more comfortable around me if he was?” she asked curiously.

He dropped his hands from the counter and told her, “You know you two haven't even asked for Tony's or my blessing?”

And as her expression collapsed into confusion from this declaration, he made a strategic retreat from the kitchen.

* * *

He went back to his rooms and, ignoring the pieces of plaster from the demolished (not load-bearing) wall, threw himself onto his sofa. After a while, he grew bored enough to ignore the self-recrimination and look at Twitter.

Bruce didn't like Twitter. It was weird and connected people in ways they probably should never be connected. He hasn't trusted it since that one time in 2013 when #BroodingBadBoyBruce went viral alongside a photo of him wearing a leather jacket – Nat's jacket, as it happened. She'd let him wear it after he'd Hulked out in Hoboken. When she saw the hashtag, she'd laughed until she had trouble breathing.

So, social media was weird, and if he felt uncomfortable searched for his friend on it, he should probably take that as a hint. And yet his fingers roved inexorably over the keyboard, pecking out four letters.

No matter what recent mess the Avengers have caused or failed to completely stop, no matter any bad press or very public disagreements taking place in full view of an airport terminal full of Europeans wielding smartphones, there was one constant in global public opinion: people _loved_ Thor.

Tony had a theory that people love Thor because he isn't human. People's ability to get attached or muster sympathy is almost endless, so long as the object of their attention isn't another human. He said when people look at Thor, they feel none of the complicated emotional baggage that came when dealing with, to pick a completely random example, a white, middle-aged Quebecer with two kids and strong feelings about provincial autonomy.

Bruce had a theory that people love Thor because he's _Thor_.

Anyway: humanity loved Thor, and that meant that at any given point during any given day, one could find videos on Twitter of people encountering him. The first one Bruce found was of Thor standing on a street somewhere in Oslo, throwing an ecstatically screaming child fifteen feet into the air as the mother stood nearby and watched with a mixture of nerves and soul-deep love (for the child or Thor, it was hard to say).

There were a few posts along those lines, and Bruce lasted five more minutes before slamming his laptop shut.

“Banner,” he said aloud to the empty room. “You're so pathetic.”

The empty room replied back in Friday's voice, “Don't worry, Bruce. I will clear your browsing history and cookies.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In my heart I know that Bruce and Rhodey bonded over a shared fondness for [bright](http://i.imgur.com/sqdieoh.jpg) [shirts](https://keithroysdon.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/tony-stark-aim-shirt-iron-man-3.jpg).


End file.
